Travel Blog

Someone left the May issue of Travel + Leisure in our lobby library. I picked it up and saw that it contained a story on Thessaloniki by an acclaimed novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker. Turning to the piece, I read the lede:

“The city of Thessaloniki, a busy Aegean seaport in the northeast of Greece, might not be high on most travelers’ must-see list, but I wanted very much to see it. Though the nation’s second-largest city has a rich and underrated cultural history, and the beaches of nearby Halkidiki are known to be spectacular, I was drawn by my family’s history.”

My first question was: How much money did Travel + Leisure spend to send this writer to Greece so it could get writing that resembles an entry in a guidebook? (Minus the two first-person interjections.) My second question was: Why do fiction writers think that they needn’t make an effort when writing travel, that travel writing is, by definition, a vacation, a time to take a break from creative thinking?

It wasn’t always so: Some of the greatest travel writing has been produced by novelists and short story writers: Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Isak Dinesen, V.S. Naipaul, to name just four. In the mid-20^th Century, the pages of Holiday were filled with evocative pieces by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, V.S. Pritchett, Paul Bowles. Travel writing, free from the coming taint of PR, was seen as a worthy endeavor, and a valuable complement to fiction.

In the past, Travel + Leisure has sent the novelist Gary Shteyngart on trips, the results of which have frequently landed in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies. But he is a sparkling exception to the rule that most contemporary fiction writers take it easy when writing travel, viewing it as a frivolous, inferior genre not worthy of their talents. They’re in it only for the free - actually, paid - vacations. They get away with it because the glossy magazines no longer care about good writing, turning their focus now almost entirely to advertising – and survival. When they eventually perish, it’s going to be hard – even for freelance travel writers – to mourn their demise.